While I'm desparately trying to download the newest bits of Orcas on my slow-and-getting-slower DSL, the ADO.NET Team is torturing me with some new posts on the Entity Framework. (Here are the links, but don't go downloading until I'm finished. Note that theres a VPC download and an MSI download.)
The first blog post shows populating an RSS feed with data coming from the Entity Model. This is a perfect fit for me since I have played a bunch with the RSS Toolkit (as well as wrote an article on it for aspNET Pro Magazine) and have been heads down in the Entity Framework lately.
The second post (which disappeared while I was writing this post - but I expect it will reappear shortly.. just watch blogs.msdn.com/adonet!) addresses one of the biggest questions about querying against the Entity Framework - what are the pros & cons of Entity SQL vs. LINQ. In discussing this, the post also lays out a lot of great background info.
The first thing people notice about Entity SQL is that it's a string and that you can't [currently] do DML with it (meaning that you would have to query with eSQL and then update with LINQ or an object context. And many quickly dismiss it because LINQ enables strongly typed querying and you can retrieve and post data with the same set of objects.
There are a lot of choices and the bigger picture is that all of these tools will evolve. Entity SQL has the advantage of flexibility as well as familiarity for programmers who wish to do ado.net type data access (connections, commands, execute, etc), when using the EntityClient with Entity SQL. (Although, yes, the DML is still an issue.) Entity SQL is also available for people using languages that aren't spelled “VB“ or “C#“.
Either way, it's a lot of new interesting stuff to learn. The ADO.NET team has been writing some great posts about Entity Framework on the team blog and the data blog.
I think the most important thing (which scares some people) is that we have a lot of options. As long as those options come to the table with guidance, it's a great scenario. Programming is not a one size fits all arena. I like what ADO.NET is becoming.